All posts tagged ‘science projects’

Late in the afternoon today, May 20, 2012, half of North America is in for a bit of a celestial show — an eclipse of the sun known as a “ring of fire.” A ring of fire happens when the moon passes in front of the disk of the sun but does not fully cover it, leaving a thin ring of sunlight to escape around the edges of the moon. Where I live in southern Washington state we will miss out on the full ring of fire, but the eclipse will still cover over 80% of the sun’s disk. Just a six hour drive to the south, Medford, Oregon will get the full show, along with Las Vegas and other parts of the Western United States.

Safely viewing an eclipse can be a bit of a trick. The first rule of thumb for any solar viewing is never look directly at the sun. The UV radiation doesn’t do good things for your eyes. This is even more important if you are using any kind of magnifying device, such as a pair of binoculars or a telescope. To understand why, simply remember the childhood trick of using a lens to burn ants on the sidewalk. By pointing a telescope or binoculars at the sun you are pointing a lens at the sun. When you look through that lens without having a properly purchased and installed solar filter your eyeball can easily become the ant, and you can do permanent damage to your eyes.

I’m going to guess that most GeekDads love science (and they love even more that their kids love science) So, when a child comes home with a science project and you happen to have a bent for the musical side of things, what do you do? If you’re like Chris and Maggie Arias, you write a song about it and publish on iTunes and Amazon.

Public Domain photo taken by Doctor Yohsuke Kamide. Part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration photo library

Maggie, a 6th grader, had a science project — the topic was one that she was able to choose — about Aurora Borealis. The original assignment was to create a paper, poster, or PowerPoint presentation containing at least five paragraphs of information. She asked her teacher if she could instead write a song and her teacher agreed.

“Oh no … oh man … I knew it. I never should have built a robot for the science fair.” Isn’t it every kid’s fantasy to build a working robot with superclaws and a laser eye? But have you really thought through the consequences of such actions?

Oh No! (Or How My Science Project Destroyed the World) is a new picture book which will hopefully teach kids to consider the potential hazards of creating giant robots. In it, a little girl wins the science fair with robot, which (naturally) goes on a rampage, destroying the city. Of course, she comes up with a great plan to stop the robot, involving a frog and a growth ray device.

The author, Mac Barnett, also wrote the hilarious The Brixton Brothers detective spoof. After reading that, I looked up some of his other books, and found that he’d written a couple of picture books. My library bought them both, and they quickly became favorites with my kids. Oh No! was just released this month, and it’s a delight. Barnett has a great way of mixing understatement with completely absurd situations.

The illustrations by Dan Santat, inspired by manga and old retro B-movie posters, are superb. The whole book has the feel of an old Japanese monster movie, down to the Japanese signs scattered throughout, but it’s also very silly—the toad’s look of utter disinterest, the dogs wearing cardboard robot suits, the other really lame science projects at the fair.

But what I really loved about the artwork is the care that went into the design of the dust jacket, the actual hardcover of the book, and the endpapers. The illustration actually wraps all the way around the cover and onto the jacket flaps. On the flip side of the dust jacket, if you remove it from the book, is a fake movie poster of the book. But the jacket-less book is far from boring: it’s a computation book, complete with stains and handwriting. And then, to top it off, the end papers show blueprints for the robot and the growth ray device, with lots of details and text. You can check out the rest of the cover art at Dan Santat’s blog.

I really liked Barnett’s other picture books, but this one in particular is a hit with my daughters, in part because the main character looks kind of like them and is clearly a smart (albeit absent-minded) girl. But even if you don’t have girls, the giant robot should be enough to grab any kid’s attention.

Robert Woodhead, self-described Mad Overlord and all-around geek, has posted an amazing amount of detail from his recent experiment in seeing how the Diet Coke & Mentos reaction works in microgravity. It’s a modification of the now-standard geyser-producing demonstration, but with a twist: performing the trick on a Zero G flight and recording it on a high-speed camera. The Youtube video is great, but the expanded description is even better:

…we wanted to create a reasonably sized ball of soda, and then put the mento into it. However, the nozzle we used to control the soda flow was too small, and we couldn’t control the exit velocity properly (and so we got all the squirts). On the second parabola (not in the video), we tried removing the nozzle, but we couldn’t get a bubble of soda to detach from the bottle, and everything got messy – a blob of soda impacted right on the camera window, obscuring a lot of the view.

He’s already planning for the next experiment using a "Mark II Menticulator":

I’ve spent a few hours thinking about an improved experimental apparatus, and I think I’ve come up with something that, with a little refinement, will do the trick.

The experiment will be housed in a transparent case constructed of acrylic or lexan panels locked together by t-slotted structural framing. Inside will be a rubber balloon of soda trapped between two spoonlike holders, one above, and one below. A hobby r/c servo will be mounted inside the box, with two arms extending from it, such that if it rotates in one direction, a sharp tip will puncture the balloon, hopefully releasing the soda which will remain between the spoons; then when it rotates in the other direction, a mento will be moved to the center of the bubble of soda.

That’s what I’m talking about. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again! (Especially if it means taking another Zero G flight.)